U Rock, U Roll

Of Montreal pumps up the crowd at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Ga. (Rich Merritt)

Yes, I'd already morphed from rock-and-roll pilgrim to yuppie tourist.

Then again, Charlottesville didn't immediately strike me as a punk-rock kind of town. The Corner, a classic collegiate strip across the street from U-Va.'s grounds, has bands, bars and debauchery, but music there seems to serve mainly as background for college kids drinking and socializing (the relatively new Satellite Ballroom is a noteworthy exception).

The mall and its environs have better venues, but the bookshops, boutiques and art galleries there ooze an easy, affluent cosmopolitanism. That's not bad, but it's a vibe more conducive to music that's fun, mellow or rootsy -- Matthews, who took off here in the early '90s, seems to fit, as does the bluegrass-inflected Americana of the up-and-coming Hackensaw Boys.

Yet you can't quite pigeonhole Charlottesville -- not when one of its more successful bands is Bella Morte, which established its dark, gothic sound on releases like "The Death Rock EP."

This mix of styles can carry over to audiences. My first night out, I hit Gravity Lounge, a bookstore/art gallery/music venue off the mall, where I joined a roughly 40-person melange of mohawked punks, middle-aged couples and even a toddler-toting mom. The audience was united only by the rapt attention they paid to raven-haired Lauren Hoffman, a Charlottesville singer-songwriter now based in New York who is, apparently, possessed of a history of passionate yet ill-fated romance.

"Don't ever fall in love with a solipsist," she sang under a line of blue lights hanging from the ceiling.

Good advice, but I ducked out to grab a table at Miller's, a top spot for jazz and a magnet for Dave Matthews pilgrims who know their idol used to tend bar there. Gushing about Matthews at Miller's will only make locals roll their eyes, but there are other reasons to visit -- like jazz trumpeter John D'earth, who's also the U-Va. music department's director of jazz performance.

With a lanky frame and burst of white hair, D'earth has played with Lionel Hampton, Bruce Hornsby and a slew of Charlottesville artists, including Matthews. D'earth's current group, the Thompson D'earth Band (singer Dawn Thompson is D'earth's wife), still squeezes just inside Miller's front window on Thursday nights.

That's when I visited, sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching band members trade solos as red neon glowed behind them.

The next night, I joined the shaggy-haired and white-kids-with-dreadlocks crowd at Starr Hill Music Hall, perhaps Charlottesville's premier venue. Drinking a microbrew produced at Starr Hill's own brewery, I watched high school and college kids stream up the stairs until I felt ancient . . . at age 28.

Reinvigoration came from the reggae beats and high-energy vocals of New York's Easy Star All-Stars, who got me -- and everyone else -- dancing on the hardwood floor. So this was current Charlottesville music, I thought: folksy, jazzy and funky, but without a hard edge.

Then I headed to the Outback Lodge, a restaurant and nightclub a short drive from downtown. Kim Dylla, singer for local metal act This Means You, was pacing the stage in fishnet stockings and a leather two-piece. Her primal shrieks convulsed a small mosh pit dominated by a large man with a mohawk, tattoos down both arms and a black tank top reading "Die Yuppie Scum."